


Gladstone

by missevalyn



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Angst, Gen, M/M, Post-Reichenbach
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-28
Updated: 2013-10-28
Packaged: 2017-12-30 17:53:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,056
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1021639
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/missevalyn/pseuds/missevalyn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>And Gladstone, the daft git, blinks open his eyes and listens.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Gladstone

 

 

Earlier, his mum tried to coax him to head back up north for the holidays — _I’m sure your father wants to see you, but you’re even more stubborn than he is_ , she'd said. And so he stopped taking her calls altogether.

Harry’s worse. She consistently leaves him voicemails after the bars close and she stumbles home: _Johnny, you need to come home soon — what, you gonna make mum and I put up with da alone again?_

But home, he thinks, feels more like it belongs between the sheets in the room upstairs, not in a little town up north. Home, he thinks, has wild hair and wiry arms. Home, he thinks, is so much stranger, so much madder, and so much better than anything he's ever known.

Home, he thinks, has a white face and a halo of blood around it.

 

Harry shows up one morning in mid-December anyway. She looks sick, looks permanently tired with her puffy purple eyes, but John knows it’s because she tried to sober up before making the trip out to see him, and so he doesn’t say anything.

“I brought someone with me,” Harry says, a little hesitantly. John’s never known her to be hesitant in her life; it makes him finally look at her. She has a bullpup in her arms, all wriggling wrinkles and a snubbed snout. “He’s yours, if you’ll have him.”

She sets him down, and lets the little bastard waddle towards the doctor. John watches him snuffle at his feet.

“Tried getting him from the same breeder as Maggie, but you won’t bloody well believe — ”

These days, John doesn’t carry on a conversation if he can help it. But the more Harry talks about ordinary things, the more he feels piled carpet between his fingers — dry, orange shag that clashes horribly with the green fabric of the furniture.

And then he's sitting with his sister, who, at fourteen years old, has started tearing off her uniform the first chance she gets. John hasn't changed yet. It's half four, but he doesn't mind the tattered cuffs of his cardigan half as much as he should.

"It's just stupid," Harry scoffs quietly, nose wrinkled. She doesn't usually watch the telly with her younger brother, but today it's where he's plunked down, notebooks balanced on his knees, most of his maths exercise already finished. Harry's grounded for poor grades anyway, and when she huffs in frustration, her supposedly-gifted brother is the only one who will still patiently explain the problem to her. Both their parents had already given up being patient with her long ago.

"It's an old episode," he mutters back, eyes not moving away from the screen. "Things were different back then."

"You aren't bothered that he doesn't even look at Sarah Jane?" she grumbles back. She pulls her knees up to her chest, squinting at the screen.

"Maybe," he says with a shrug.  Behind them, Maggie, their old bulldog, gets up and shakes, jowls flopping about. "Isn't the point, though."

"You'd rather the Doctor were a poof, then?"

John's ears flush with red.

" … wouldn't really change things. World would still need him," he says with some reluctance.

“He’s not even really human though, is he?”

"Well, no. No, he isn’t like anyone else. And so he'd still need a companion, yeah? He’d need someone with a heart, someone human, regardless of how bright and brilliant — "

"He has a celery stalk pinned to his chest. Be embarrassing as all hell to be out with him."

The former soldier watches the little dog stumbling over his toes and thinks that, maybe, some things are worth the embarrassment.

“Gladstone,” he interrupts. It shuts Harry right up. The silence expands until it fills the room. “ … he still needs a name, yeah?”

She gives him a bewildered stare.

“He was a prime minister,” he offers, frowning.

“Like Maggie?” she starts, the corners of her eyes crinkling. “Why not Brown, or Blair? Something more sensible, like — ”

“Because it’s the second most ridiculous name I’ve ever heard a man have.”

It shuts Harry right up.

 

Later, Harry mentions craving a cigarette. The good doctor would normally worry about her trading one addiction for another, but points out a pack still stashed inside the skull anyway. Harry slips outside, and John thinks that he had to know they were there all along. 

He liked to humour John. He used to smile when he did it.

 

After the first couple of weeks, John doesn’t leave the flat for a while. At first, he leads the pup on jaunts around the block, but soon his leg starts seizing up again and Mrs. Hudson, hip and all, takes over.

Instead, the doctor passes the time between sleeping and avoiding most everyone else by sifting through his work, but soon he finishes turning over everything in the flat.

Everything, except his room. It's stays shut the entire time, locked off, as if John could somehow offend him by trespassing. Even harder is the idea that everything he left behind is finite, and that as the doctor nears the end of it all, he'll never be able to surprise anyone again.

“Sherlock … ”

It’s the first time he’s said the name in months, and the realisation makes ice crawl through his gut. He hangs his head, folds his hands.

Gladstone, the daft git, blinks open his eyes and listens.

“He wouldn’t have loved you. At least, he would’ve never admitted it. And he was a right prick. He was arrogant and rude, sarcastic and condescending, and yet he was somehow childishly sensitive to any criticism. He was inconsiderate and had no concept of personal boundaries, he was jealous and possessive and selfish and _every goddamn minute with him was wonderful_.”

John sighs, knowing he’d still follow that madman anywhere.

“… do you know what I wanted to be as a child? I wanted to be a writer; I settled for being a doctor instead."

But then he became _his_ doctor. And now it hurts too much to write.

The doctor flexes his fingers.

“He always teased me, you know, for everything I wrote and how I wrote it. Said I romanticised fact. And maybe I did.”

And so the next thing he says is dressed down, stripped, a naked truth without any more layers to pull away.

“I miss him.”

 


End file.
